Software & Apps - Page 93

The Chrome Beta channel has just opened for Android today, offering up version 25.0.1364.8. It acts just the same as the Beta channel for a PC, which offers up a preview of features and fixes that has already passed the development channel and is on its way to final testing before it gets baked into the final version.

It makes for the perfect way to try out new things that might still be broken, but will allow the software to function as a hole. The release offered up comes with the following bugs:

If you want to hit up the Beta channel, check it out here.

Android adoption continues to expand at rapid rates, but as quick as it's expanding with new devices sporting Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, or older devices coming with Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, older revisions of Android are seeing declines in market share.

It wasn't too long ago that Android 2.3 Gingerbread enjoyed more than 50% of the Android market share on devices, but that has now shrunk to 47.3%. Android 4.1 has scooped up 9% of the market share, with Android 4.2.1 seeing just 1.2%. Gingerbread's share of the Android OS market is expected to decline in the future as more devices ship with updated versions of the Android OS. Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich (and higher) versions of Android now represent over 40% of the entire Android OS market share.

Google, and their partners like Samsung, LG and more will continue to push out Jelly Bean-based devices which will only see Jelly Bean's numbers increase. As consumers upgrade to these devices, Gingerbread's market share will continue to drop - which is great, as it's a very old OS. Android has come a very long way since Gingerbread, and it looks like users are noticing this, and upgrading.

Microsoft has brought up an issue last dealt with over a year ago. Back in a March, 2011 post regarding Microsoft's concerns about Google's anti-trust investigations, the company said that Google is preventing Microsoft from accessing data that would allow a full-featured YouTube app on Windows Phone.

What they wrote at the time:

Reddit has certainly been a smash hit since its inception, but just how big was it in 2012? Well, according to the numbers released by the site, they received a massive 37 billion page views. An incredible number that is even more impressive when you add that those page view numbers were generated by 400 million unique users.

The site also saw 30 million posts, which gained 4 billion votes. Averaged out, it works out to be roughly 133 votes per post. Reddit's AMA with Obama is the record post, bringing in 5.5 million page views.

Reddit has released a post with the top posts of 2012 and the Best of 2012 Awards.

Windows 8 users are gaining access to more and more apps, according to stats by MetroStore Scanner. The Windows Store now has more than 35,000 Windows 8 apps and that number is increasing by an average rate of 415 apps per day. Back in November, that number was only increasing by 362 per day, showing developer interest has picked up.

This information is just data, so use it how you will. It doesn't say anything to the quality of the apps, usefulness, or other things regarding the apps, just the quantity. October 30, when Windows 8 launched, it had 10,000 apps. November 6 saw 13,000, November 14, 16,000, and November 22, 20,000.

Some OEMs are saying their poor PC sales are due to poor Windows 8 demand. However, there have been more than 40 million licenses sold so far, and developer interest seems to be increasing, a sign that Windows 8 is a viable platform with plenty of demand.

I've got to admit, this is the first version of Windows that has come out that I have just not had any interest in. Usually I have the beta of the latest version, then the RC, and then the RTM at the first second I can get them from TechNet. Windows 8? Not so much.

It looks like most consumers are having the same apprehensions, as the next-gen, touch-optimized OS from Microsoft has had a bad uptake when compared to Windows Vista. Windows 8's uptake has now fallen behind Vista's in the same point in it's release according to Net Applications' data.

Windows 8's online usage share is around 1.6% of all Windows PCs, which is less than the 2.2% share that Windows Vista sported at the same two-month mark after its release. The data was collected up until December 22, so there's still just over a week of data until the end of the year to collect. But I'm sure that by then it won't make a difference.

Plenty of people I know love their iPhone, but when pressed for what they love most, it's from a cracked feature coming from something like Installous and AppSync - well, those days are over, folks.

The Hackulous team have announced that they're shutting down, which will take down their most popular apps - the above-mentioned Installous and AppSync. This is the message the team left:

Last month, Mozilla announced that they would be killing the 64-bit version of Firefox for Windows due to many bugs and insecurities in the version, coupled with the fact very few users actually used or needed the 64-bit version. Mozilla has now reversed that decision due to backlash from users of the 64-bit version.

Mozilla is still looking to transition the large majority of 64-bit users over to the 32-bit version, though they will continue to provide nightly builds of the 64-bit version. Users will be forced onto the 32-bit through an automatic update, but will be able to download the 64-bit nightly and reinstall.

"After I announced my decision to disable 64-bit Windows nightlies, there was significant negative feedback. After reviewing that feedback, and consulting with Release Engineering, I believe that we can keep a set of users happy by making a modification to the original plan," Smedberg said. "I do hope that the projects and developers who are interested in win64 will work together to maintain this build configuration. I am interested in hearing from volunteers who want to become the 64-bit build maintainer. I will also set up a discussion list specifically for win64 issues, if that would be valuable."

It's important that users of the Facebook Camera app update to the latest version as the previous versions featured a security vulnerability that would allow hackers to tap the network and hijack accounts. They were able to gain access to information such as email addresses and passwords.

Versions pre-1.1.2 and releases before December 21 feature the vulnerability that was discovered by Mohamed Ramadan, an Egyptian security researcher with Attack-Secure. The problem apparently resided in the SSL certification:

Lawyers are making some serious bank these days with the countless lawsuits between tech giants Samsung and Apple, but it looks like the former is suing Apple for their Notification Center.

In their home country of South Korea, the electronics giant are suiting Samsung for the feature that debuted with iOS 5. There is some risk, though, as the Notification Center isn't a standards-essential patent, so if Samsung loses, they'll be coughing up some money to Apple.

At the moment it's not known if Samsung are defending a patent they have in possession or whether they have enhanced an existing patent that some other company had received before Apple launched the Notification Center. Keep in mind that Samsung can't sue for something that Google patented, and considering Samsung run Android and not their own custom OS, this could get interesting.

If you're an Android app builder and were wanting to sprinkle a little YouTube into your app, today is your day! Google have released the Android YouTube Player API.

You'll now be able to bake YouTube into any app you want, and will sport high-quality playback for Android devices featuring Android 2.2 and above. Since there's simple integration, there are a bunch of goodies that will keep you happy.

This includes full screen and orientation mode support, closed captions display, support for YouTube ads and the ability to program most elements of the playback experience natively within your app. There are developers who have already dabbled in it, such as Flipboard. Full details can be found here.

PayPal has just been updated and includes a nice new feature: landscape support. Now you can turn your phone sideways and enjoy landscape PayPal, if that's something you'd like to see. There's also the ability to set a payment preference for specific stores.

This ability can come in handy if you'd like to use a particular card at one store, and another for something more simple like a coffee shop of McDonald's. The change log also states that PayPal have improved the performance of check scanning, as well as the usual bug fixes.

The app sports improved security and a few UI fixes, and you can get the app right here from the Google Play Store.

Instagram has caught a bit of flak over the past couple of days after releasing updated Terms of Service and Privacy Policy documents. The reason? Inside the new documents there seemed to be a bit of text that indicated Instagram was planning on selling users' pictures without any sort of compensation.

Instagram has now apologized for the text that was "confusing" and says they are working on updating it to be more clear. They say the bottom line is that "it is not our intention to sell your photos. We are working on updated language in the terms to make sure this is clear."

Instagram offers the following regarding ownership rights and privacy settings:

With BlackBerry 10 being RIM's last ditch effort to compete with the too-powerful Apple and Google, leaked screenshots are now here to try and help would be customers to get excited.

The leaked shots show off the BlackBerry 10 L-Series, which has been revealed by some people on the Tinhte Vietnamese forums. The new pictures show off the updated UI from RIM, and show off the new "BlackBerry Hub" which is an all-in-one message center that sports a voice interface.

You'll see that the pull-down menu looks suspiciously close to Android 4.1/4.2 Jelly Bean, and the home screen just looks like a poor mans version of iOS and Android. Personally I'm not enjoying what I'm seeing and I already see RIM as a sinking ship - do you think this will turn them around? Do the leaked shots excite you at all?

Apple users were patiently waiting for the true maps application to come out, after Apple tripped over themselves releasing the iPhone 5 and iOS 6 with its lackluster navigation app.

Well, Google released Google Maps for iOS last week and it has since passed 10 million downloads. The news comes from Google's Senior Vice President of Commerce and Local, Jeff Huber.

It goes to show the power of Google Maps, and just how popular they are. Apple are going to have a very rough road ahead of them for bringing users back to their Maps app, even if it went through huge changes.

Instagram has updated it policies to reflect that it now shares your data with its parent company Facebook. This most likely has no affect on most users and Facebook already has all the data anyway.

The major change here is that the old policy stated that instagram shared your data with "Service providers" and third party advertisers, and now it shares that data with "Affiliates".

None of this should come as a surprise though as Facebook is after all a company that earns its paycheck by collecting user data. Users are still able to choose who their instagram photos are shared with, and they still can choose not to post the photos on Facebook.

Another week, another ad from Microsoft trying to push their latest operating systems. The latest ad is titled "Windows 8: Introducing a New World of Apps", which goes for two minutes and tries to show off the fact at just how powerful their new OS is, and can be for the future, all while swiping their claws at Apple and Google.

There are some quotes MS use within the ad, such as "A worldwide app store with over 1 billion potential users!". Yes, Microsoft, welcome to all the other app stores. Also, "Over the last 2 years, more Windows licenses have been sold than Android, iOS and Macs combined". Again, a great statement - but MS are hurting compared to Google and Apple's complete stranglehold on the mobile market right now.

The video seems suited to developers, so much so that if they weren't already coding for Windows, they should because there's endless possibilities with the platform.

With the release of Android 4.2, Google started including a malware scanner that was designed to warn users if an app tested to be a possible malware app. A computer scientist at North Carolina State University decided to put the scanner to the test and found some interesting results.

Xuxian Jiang found that just 15.32 percent of samples were detected as malware. Jiang used a new Nexus 10 tablet and exposed it to 1,260 different malicious apps. Sadly, the built-in detection system detected just 193. He then pitted the Google system against anti-virus apps from the big names: Avast, Symantec, and Kaspersky .

He found that the third-party apps detected 51 percent to 100 percent of samples picked from the 49 malware families. Google's service found just 20 percent of the same samples. He notes that Google's method of detection can be easily bypassed. Google uses a cryptographic has signature of the app to identify those that have been found to be malicious. .

NVIDIA announced their "GeForce Experience" earlier this year, and have now released a beta that will allow the first 10,000 people to register to get their hands on it. After the signups have closed, NVIDIA will monitor the user feedback and take out any of the big bugs.

The GeForce Experience only supports 32 games at the moment, and just the Fermi- and Kepler-based NVIDIA GPUs. More games will be added to the supported list in the coming weeks. If you don't know what the GeForce Experience offers, it will help people who don't optimize their games for their specific hardware. Enthusiasts, like myself and I'm sure many others reading this, will sit there and optimize their graphics settings in their games to get the best performance, or quality.

Everyone is different - some people like a mix of medium/high graphics and a steady 60fps or 120fps minimum (that would be me). There are others who want the maximum eye candy, and will find no problem running at 30fps or lower. NVIDIA's software will help those who don't want to sit there adjusting sliders and settings, with the software eventually being capable of accessing NVIDIA's cloud-based supercomputers that will work out, and then download the best in-game settings for your particular PC.

Spotify talked up their subscriber numbers a little earlier on today, and at the same time we saw the CEO and founder of Spotify, Daniel Ek, noting that members love the service when they know what they want to listen to, but if users are looking for something new - Spotify isn't that great.

In order to work around this, Spotify are set to unveil a new Discovery section which will help people find new music that they might be interested in listening to based on their listening habits. A new Collection feature will also be released, which will let listeners bundle all of their music into a single space versus having multiple playlists. Ek said that a third of all playlists on Spotify are just albums that people have saved - and that's true, I'm one of those people.

Ek added that the Collection view is all about making the experience easier for the listener to save music any way that they want. The final feature is Follow, which will facilitate friends or celebrities. Once you've followed someone, the music that they listen to and the playlists that they compile will display in the soon-to-be-released Discovery section.